the characters in my novels seem more real than me. By John Grochalski

the booze runs

down my throat

like my own personal niagara

and the characters in my novels

seem more real than me

always plotting and planning

as if they were the center of the universe

instead of being another anxious beast

fixed to die angry and alone

in this garbage farce

walking by cemeteries on hot summer days

late for somewhere i don’t even want to be

watching tombstones age

with epigraphs on everyone’s grave

that secretly read

i should’ve been there more for you

and you should’ve been there more for me

…but now, my friends

everything’s become nothing

but all of this.

John Grochalski is the author of the poetry collections, The Noose Doesn’t Get Any Looser After You Punch Out (Six Gallery Press 2008), Glass City (Low Ghost Press, 2010), In The Year of Everything Dying (Camel Saloon, 2012), Starting with the Last Name Grochalski (Coleridge Street Books, 2014), and The Philosopher’s Ship (Alien Buddha Press, 2018). He is also the author of the novels, The Librarian (Six Gallery Press 2013), and Wine Clerk (Six Gallery Press 2016).  Grochalski currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where the garbage can smell like roses if you wish on it hard enough.